Try Vanillux;
http://vanillux.org/

It's a friend's project. APT based but uses Gnome 3. Still beta, so they'd appreciate anyone that uses it and gives feedback. You don't even need to download an ISO and can convert your existing Ubuntu install to Vanillux.


In Ubuntu, do this in terminal;

Source: http://wiki.vanillux.org/wiki/HOW-TO_Insta...lux_from_Ubuntu

What the commands does;;
Adds Vanillux sources and a secure keyring, removes all the Ubuntu-related stuff and then instalsl it's own packages.

They have quite a good-looking roadmap. It's planned as a rolling-release, so what their doing is basically taking your Ubuntu and converting it back to something closer to Debian, but easier to use and maintain. They also seem to have their own Testing, Unstable, Upstream and Vendor repos.



This post has been edited by G-17: Jul 26 2011, 09:23 AM

Wait for elementary os Luna

Mint XFCE already using Debian.
Mint KDE 11 on the way.

This sounds very interesting. Happy to try it out.

What's the difference?

Great.

Imagine if you have an AMD/Intel processor with number of cores and high clockspeed, which is the most "powerful" os (probably specific linux distro) would you like to install on it? (p/s I just got an i7 lalalala)

This post has been edited by farizluqman: Jul 26 2011, 10:12 PM

I wouldn't want to waste a minimalist setup on it.

... Actually, I'm currently running Ubuntu with GNOME+Unity, KDE and Openbox on a first-gen i7 laptop.

i7 is nothing actually. Right now the newer kernels seem to consume more RAM as well, so you'd better be prepared with more RAM sticks

Why not? I have a pair of Xeon procs (2010) in my main workstation and I still run ScrotWM, Openbox and Xmonad on it. The difference between a DE and lightweight WM might not be as pronounced as on older hardware, but there still is a difference you can (and will) notice.

Hell, on my old studio's 8 core Mac Pro, I still installed Xmonad and replaced Leopard's front-end. It was much snappier than Apple's own "optimized for the hardware" DE.

Of course, you can install KDE4 or Gnome3 and still get more than decent performance. No one's stopping you.

Regarding kernel memory footprint;
3.0 on a fully functional WM consumes around 5 -7 mb less ram than 2.6.37/38/39 on my netbook (i686 32bit install). Haven't tested with 64bit on my workstation or secondary desktop yet (waiting for some other libs to transition). Kernel weight is hugely dependent on the drivers/modules you require it to load. So far, with the WMs I tend to run, I've never had any desktop (i686, pae or amd64) use more than 105mb RAM on a fresh boot. Usually around 40mb+ for a 32bit desktop, 50 - 60mb on a 32bit notebook (wireless and bluetooth daemons) and around 90 - 100mb for a 64 bit desktop (with Nvidia proprietary binary drivers and patched ALSA modules for my Asus Xonar loaded, mind you). The last kernel I've used that was lighter than 3.0 was probably 2.6.31, if I remember correctly. Note: Comparizon done on Vanilla and Zen kernels. Recompiled kernels would be even lighter.

This post has been edited by G-17: Jul 26 2011, 11:07 PM

On a totally different note, has anybody got AMD's Radeon SDK drivers to work in linux? I require it to run a very specialized type of program.

Hmm , if you want stability , try Debian

For eyecandy + repo ppa based + lightweight

Go for elementary os luna when it releases later this year or try Jupiter which is gnome 2.23 based

For clutterless and minimal to the most , and install the things which you need only - Arch Linux

For user friendly - Linux Mint

Seriously , i hate both gnome3 and unity scrot is amazing

As I've mentioned many times before, I have almost zero experience with ATI on Linux (or any OS for that matter), but maybe you can point me to the SDK sources/packages/page and I'll see if I can consult some people or maybe run a virtualized simulation or something. No promises, though, and it'll probably be after working hours.

Sorry for being so useless on the ATI front. I have no machines with ATI cards and I've not played with SDKs in ages.



There are other alternatives like GRML, Crux, Gentoo, Slackware. The benefit of Arch is that it provides a beginner-friendly wiki guide. Either way, I would not recommend any of these to Chyan at the moment.

A good choice. COmes in bothe Ubuntu and Debian-based varients these days, and they're classic Gnome implementation is better than most distros. I personally like their FluxBox Edition.

Welcome to the tiling club!! : D

This post has been edited by G-17: Jul 27 2011, 01:36 PM

Don't worry about not knowing anything about it. It was a shot in the dark.

Thing is, you can download the drivers from here : http://developer.amd.com/sdks/radeon/Pages/default.aspx

When I try to build the drivers, build fails. Running checkinstall and build gives me about 1 million errors.

Would be good if I could see the error log, or at least a part of it. For all you know it just might be a missing library or you might just need to tweak the makefile a bit. Debian's currently in a state of flux with the transition to a multiarch base (for Testing and Unstable branches), so some libraries might have been relocated to different folders/locations. I'm currently suffering from broken libasound2-plugin-equal (alsaequal) thanks to that.

Anyways, I'll take a look at the source later and see if I can make out anything.

*crosses fingers*

Elementary getting better n better

ati cards really give me headache on linux
on debian i cannot even boot after installing fglrx driver. on fedora can install, but got nice "unsupported hardware" watermark on lower right of the screen. lol

For this week I just started my shift at the notebook department of my shop...

... and there are lots of hardware which just screams me to want to try install a Linux distro and see how well it supports the hardware.

Of current interest are those with AMD's APUs and a certain Acer laptop which is just RM100 more expensive than what I have but is twice meatier... and has a freaking Blu-ray drive

Also I really want to try Ubuntu on the Nvidia Tegra devices.

---

Added on July 29, 2011, 11:10 pmSigh, there has been problems with ATI cards and their driver... with the kernels.

Last time I had to manually patch the driver to suit the 2.6.38 kernels.

And then I had to do another patch to allow the driver to work in the 2.6.39 kernels.

Also with new hardware rolling out, it's just a matter of time before one blurts "God damn it! Everytime they make new hardware they break my <insert your favorite Linux distro's name here>'s support! Now this is why I hate buying new things!" etc.

Fortunately ATI's binary driver blobs' support for newer and newer kernels keep improving for each Catalyst release.

This post has been edited by FlameReaper: Jul 29 2011, 11:10 PM

For those who care, KDE 4.7 is out.

Now waiting for the *buntu packages...

My laptops always are in AMD GPUs. Kinda pissed TBH.

Though, when my Acer got stolen, this Dell fixes the battery issue.
But GPU is always the problem.

How's Scrot?
I still don't have much knowledge on it.

T

---

Added on July 31, 2011, 8:43 pmOh, if I were to get Black SOD's and is irrecoverable. What should I do?
Don't matter if its GPU or accidental driver related issues.



This post has been edited by Chyan: Jul 31 2011, 08:43 PM

Unfortunately, Tegra 2 is one of the worst mobile GPU out there, since its not matured. Also, Ubuntu has been reported to be working with chroot + vnc on SGSII, the same method with the X10.

Scrot is amazing

My install very minimal , Debian minimal + Scrot + Slim , low dependencies , less gnome shits = Lightweight system

But they say Arch's is much lighter than Debian but i still prefer apt's

Nope, that's just a misconception concocted by the fanbois who think Arch = religion.
I have an Arch and a Debian (GRML) install on different partitions on the same computer. Both use the same WM, same journaling (root=ext4, /home=xfs), same swap size, same apps, same kernel versions (2.6.39-ARCH vs 2.6.39-aptosid) Both boot in the same amount of time (actually, my GRML boots around a couple of seconds faster), consume around the same amount of RAM, and take up around the same HDD space. Debian tends to install more Xorg libraries than Arch, but you can easily remove them with smxi (google it) or manually via aptitude. Arch's package manager (pacman) is faster than apt, but lacks gpg signing. Both also use a single rc file for configuration (GRML uses rc-file instead of Debian's default sysv-rc).

You can apply the K.I.S.S philosophy to either.

This post has been edited by G-17: Jul 31 2011, 11:26 PM